Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family - <AUTHOR> https://monicahq.com <comment><AUTHOR> Founder here. Here to answer any questions you might have. The site is not perfect, it's not mobile optimized, there are probably bugs, there is a gazillion features missing, no APIs but it's a labour of love, open-source and I hope it will help people other than me. I want to grow this product but I need to know what you need, people. Edit: sorry for the bugs I see on my server popping here and there. Didnt expect that much users and traffic.

<comment><USER2> This product is dangerous to privacy. It's easy to imagine how this data could be exploited if Monica is sold to Facebook, Google, etc.

How are you working to guarantee my data is protected from any manner use outside my own?

<comment><USER3> As these things go, the privacy policy is excellent, and can be read in under a minute:

[https://monicahq.com/privacy.html](https://monicahq.com/privacy.html)

<comment><USER4> It's not excellent. Nothing about data security, encryption at rest, and a whole load of things that would be covered by GDPR (yes the service is registered in Canada, but GDPR standards should be the benchmark now for what is considered acceptable for anything).

This is an intriguing idea as a concept but feels like it isn't a sufficient focus. The privacy page hasn't been updated in 18 months either, yet the release notes mention encryption at rest (with very little detail) being added in October 16.

<comment><USER5> Just as a data point, this is the first time I ever heard about GDPR. Not sure it's "the minimum acceptable standard for anything".

<comment><USER6> If you have users in the EU/EEA then you _will_ have to comply, or risk a fine of up to €20,000,000 or 4% of your _global_ turnover (whichever is larger).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My uncle died suddenly this year. He was unbelievably caring - and not just to family - but to everyone he ever met. His funeral was jam packed with everyone from homeless people to executives of multi-billion dollar companies.

I always thought that his ability to always have you, and whatever you had last talked about with him, on his mind at any moment was some kind of supernatural gift. I was surprised to find out at his funeral that he actually kept an excel spreadsheet of everyone he met and what they needed and were going through. He reviewed this constantly.

It didn't lessen his genuine love for everyone, just let him be a little more super human.

<comment><USER8> This is exactly what Facebook should be. An augmented agent to help us be more helpful and empathetic to friends and family.

I'm sorry for your loss. Your uncle sounds like a great human being.

<comment><USER9> This is what a lot of us who don't hate Zuck's guts actually do use FB for.

<comment><USER10> It's not that I hate Zuckerberg that I find it hard to use Facebook, but that I trust them less than the other super-presences outs there (justified or not), and I dislike how it changes my perceptions of some of my friends. The constant posting of inane shit starts to look less like keeping in touch and more like an addiction to my eyes. I still like those people, and enjoy their company, but being constantly exposed to their posts feels like being in their living room as they crack open that 8 AM beer after waking up. It gets uncomfortable, but it's also not something I'm sure it's my place to butt into, since to this point it appears mostly harmless.

It _is_ the best tool to keep in contact we currently have though, so I do pop in every week or two to check on notifications. The times I go longer I end up missing events friends have put together and not notified in other ways about, so I try to remember to check in fairly regularly.

I only hope they don't swing their attention towards those of us that shun the feed any time soon, and try to find a way to tweak our reward response for that as well (or at least in a more effective way. I'm sure they've put at least some attention to it).

<comment><USER11> I still sometimes wonder if anyone else has a good name for what Facebook lost somewhere in the switch between the much more ephemeral "Status" system of 2004's TheFacebook to today's "Posts" and their littered, ad-filled home the "News Feed".

Even the "Notes" system in the middle of the transition was more "opt in" than firehose and a bit more rare and curated by the fewer users using it.

There is a spirit to the old systems lost to the new ones that I can't quite name. In the rush to increase communication overall, and build an addictive platform that people feel a need to check often, perhaps too much of the signal has been drowned out in noise. But that doesn't feel a strong description either because the signals become so different, too.

<comment><USER12> Separation of responsibilities?

Statuses were great as a brief update of a friend's change in their state of mind. I could follow up as I saw fit, often just keeping it in mind for the next time we met up.

Posts and news is just a steady steam of information... repeated opinions, content that forms their opinion, attempts at converting others, or minor events that would have been interesting to talk about but bland now that I've seen the highlights online... Often in impersonal monologue form, or equally impersonal many-to-many chat.

Those features gutted the middle of the friend spectrum, their UX no longer aligns with natural social patterns. Humans talk more and about different things as we become closer friend's, slowly acclimating to each other. Facebook is optimized for tight social groups. News posts are useful for my inner group, but I had to unfriend most of my more nebulous connections because their updates were basically spam in the context of my life.

Facebook's features no doubt provides better revenue from ads/targeted spam for shareholders, but they've lost what I found useful for networking and developing new relations. If anything, their new features are impediments.

At this point, I've completely dropped Facebook in favor of email and chat (mix of apps)... It's a better experience than Facebook news and posts, obvious data privacy wins, and my friends and I can share higher resolution pictures without coupling to any specific platform. I haven't found a good alternative for networking, aside from LinkedIn (okish) and plain ol' phone calls/sms/in-store meetups. Maybe that's the best there is.

<comment><USER11> I think this gets close to the meat of it, yes. TheFacebook in 2004 was still something closer to its yearbook metaphor: here's the people I met this year in college and here's what they wrote on my yearbook that year.

I guess the real emblematic touch point of the change over the years is much more from each person's "Wall" being the important push hubs of conversations to the "Wall" being subsumed by the modern "Timeline" and relegated to an annual flurry of birthday well-wishers and not much else.

That opt-in push mentality versus opt-out pull mentality is quite different: I'm going to go post this cool thing on my friend's wall BECAME I'm going to post this cool thing and maybe all of my friends might see it in their news feeds (if the algorithms deem it maybe worthy and my friends haven't muted me).

Maybe that's why "Events" still seems like one of the bright spots in Facebook? "Events" for the most part still retains a lot of an "opt-in push mentality"; for the most part you still create an event and explicitly invite friends to it. Certainly the News Feed has the pull sort of events and the "I'm Interested" interest pull buttons, but the events I really care about still follow that classic push model, and probably always will...

In TheFacebook we delegated responsibility to post things we cared about to our Walls to our friends. In Facebook we find that responsibility to curate the things we care about in our News Feeds has been delegated to algorithms and advertisers somewhat beyond our control.

<comment><USER13> I think the new equivalent of "I'm going to go post this cool thing on my friend's wall" is "I'm going to send this to my friend on Messenger", although that can be borderline too once you start talking about groups with more than two people.

I agree Events is the highlight of Facebook these days. Although, it has been steadily corroded as well, and FB Messenger's Plans has muddied the waters a fair chunk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I built one of these for myself in 1995 and have been happily using it ever since. Here's the source code:

      0 0 19 7 *      /usr/bin/mail -s "REMINDER: john T. birthday" firstname.lastname@example.com
      0 0 1 8 *       /usr/bin/mail -s "REMINDER: MAKE xmas hotel reservations NOW for good pricing..." email@example.com

<comment><USER15> Could you explain how it works? I wonder what 0 0 19 7 * means.

<comment><USER16> It's a unix/linux crontab, for repetitive task. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron)

It's minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week

In this case, repeat every 19th of july at midnight.

<comment><USER17> This is why I like HN, and why it continues to be a much-higher-quality place to visit on the web than many other forums: there were no snarky replies, no "I can't believe you don't know cron" \- just multiple friendly, helpful replies explaining exactly what this format is.

What a good community.

<comment><USER18> Actually my first thought was - that guy was a smart-ass showing off. Of course many people wouldn't know a crontab line - Windows (and I guess Mac - never had one) don't have such magical tools.

<comment><USER19> Mac has cron. It's pretty standard on *NIX systems.

<comment><USER20> Yeah but is superseded by launchd. So although it has cron, it's not running by default for many years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> IMHO: You want to pivot this product, now, to compete with ourfamilywizard.com. OFW is a great concept but the site runs slow, its search and reporting is erratic and basic, and the UI can be difficult. It is, however, the only game in town for managing divorced families and its about $200 per year. It also features:

\- Timestamped and hashed communications and records. \- Lower price point than OFW. \- More intuitive reporting.

This will NOT have widespread appeal under its current use, and will be tough to make money from.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing out to this site. There is probably a lot of good ideas to take from it.

<comment><USER22> > There is probably a lot of good ideas to take from it.

They might actually be robinhood.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is anyone else getting a dystopian vibe from the idea of "managing" friends and family?

I can definitely see this service being useful, but that branding makes me feel very uncomfortable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know :-/ Sorry about this, I'm trying to find the best way to explain what it does, without using a boring video that sucks, or poetic terms that say nothing. If you have any idea, please, please let me know :-D

<comment><USER24> The product is super cool and useful, although I hope you won't limit it to being a single-user thing because it could actually evolve into an amazing social tool. But I would really lose the word 'manage', it kind of suggests that personal relations are just another kind of task which is apt to make the people being related to feel devalued because they're not important enough to be given space in someone's day-to-day consciousness.

 _poetic terms that say nothing_

?!

If poetic terms say nothing then why is poetry (both literary and lyrical, as in songs) so popular? Social relations are not purely functional or transactional, although they often have those aims or characteristics. Friendship and warm familial relations are based on feelings. I often say that hackers need to develop better emotional intelligence and this is a good example.

Would you take someone on a date and say 'statistics indicate that we have a high degree of socioeconomic compatibility and synergistic aesthetic appeal, suggesting that we should pursue a merger strategy so as to maximize our mutual future advantage?' Most people would prefer to hear something along the lines of 'I love you and want to marry you.'

I understand that your product is aimed at busy people who are invested in their work and want to handle their social relations at least as well as their business ones. But you need to be cognizant of their _motivations_ for doing that; because they like, love and generally care about the people in their lives that lie outside their career. It is that drive which might move someone to start using your product, and you must appeal to that drive, which is an emotional one, in emotional terms.

Incidentally, calling it Monica carries connotations of having an assistant called Monica that helps you remember those little personal obligations and although I'm sure you didn't intend this it gives me a sort of sexist vibe because historically such tasks have often been delegated to stereotypically female subordinates by busy executives (think Pepper Potts in the Iron Man story franchise).

Even though both men and women seem to prefer female identities for things like GPS and virtual assistants, a gendered brand identity like this is likely to limit your appeal to one half of the population straight out of the gate. The brand values you wish to attach to your product are reliability, loyalty, and patience, so it would be worth your while to dig through mythology and fiction in search of characters who are associated with those qualities and then develop variations from any particularly inspiring name stems you encounter so as to leverage those psychic associations.

<comment><AUTHOR> You know what I meant. I didn't imply poetry meant nothing. Of course not. But I see SAAS more and more describing their product in ways that are too marketing to me. I prefer to go straight to the point.

Regarding the gender, I don't know what to think about this. It's not by any mean a way to degrade women. I will definitely consider choosing another name because I understand how some people could be offended by that, which is not at all my intention, ever.

<comment><USER24> Of course I know what you meant, but I'm trying to give you some free branding advice that would substantially increase the likely uptake for your tool.I am not a marketing oriented person either, but successful businesses often spend about the same money/effort on marketing as they do on product development. That's certainly the magic formula in the film industry - 50% on the production and 50% on the ad campaign.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree and thanks a lot for your comment. I know I should be much better at marketing, it's nearly the most important criteria for a software to succeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> You might be interested in _friends(1)_ which is a cli implementation of something similar :)

I really liked how it showed you simple stats on your interactions and did some clever text analysis so you could make entries as regular sentences.

(1) [https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/friends](https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/friends)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh wow!!! Thanks so much for the link, it looks amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Call me cynical, but I find the term CRM pretty wrong. Yes, I understand what it does, people have been keeping track of this stuff (if I read the intro page correctly) for ages, and still I find this borderline creepy and overengineered.

Disclaimer: I am using e.g. Facebook's "On this day" feature to reminisce about old stuff with friends, I also keep birthdays in a calendar. Maybe just the professional spin puts me off :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand what you mean. I don't like it either, but I've yet to find another way of explaining quickly what it does. A CRM for friends is very explanatory. But I dislike the creepiness of it.

<comment><USER26> Also maybe it's a not-a-native-speaker thing, but your use of "Manage significant others" gave me a good chuckle because all I could think of at first how it can help to hide your affair from your spouse. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah ah - well. Definitely a non native speaker thing. If you want to help fine tune the marketing site, it's open source too. [https://github.com/monicahq/monicahq.github.io](https://github.com/monicahq/monicahq.github.io)

<comment><USER27> To be fair, as a native speaker it still confused me off the bat, haha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> francis-io Something self hosted, but with integrations with gmail would be very useful for me (and something I would donate too). Push/pull from google calendar, push/pull emails from a contact, grouping people, sending unique emails to each member of a group. That kind of thing.

<comment><USER28> Its on Github and is easy to selfhost. And yes I agree, adding "import from FB would be awesome"

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> CRM? No... PRM... Personal Relationship Management. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there such a thing? If there is, I'll switch the wording in no time :-D

<comment><USER30> Don't worry about things not being a thing. You're making the thing

<comment><USER31> Okay, that made my day. Quotable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Quick note to the founders: You need to add more genders. A lot of early adopters in the Bay Area have friends who are non-binary or are non-binary themselves. I don't want to be forced to mis-gender people who don't identify as male or female.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely. My bad. The kind of stuff you don't think about when you are your only user. I'll add that, as well as the possibility to not indicate gender at all.

<comment><USER33> Instead of "gender", you should make it "preferred pronoun".

<comment><USER34> I'd like both actually :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Thanks for making this open-source. It seems to use Homestead for deployments and Homestead apparently needs a VM. Is there a way to make this work without a VM or have a docker file maybe?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I use Homestead because it's much more convenient. But you can use anything that you want, as long as you have PHP and mySQL. MAMP, for instance, XAMP, or really whatever. Have you heard of Valet ([https://laravel.com/docs/5.4/valet](https://laravel.com/docs/5.4/valet)) ?

<comment><USER35> No I'm very alien to the PHP ecosystem. Valet seems to be Mac-only. I'm a happy Windows user who has some Linux servers to play around. It would be very nice to have a step-by-step manual installation guide, then who knows, maybe you would get a pull-request with a Dockerfile! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is where I need the community. I'm just a small Laravel amateur developer who doesn't know much about Docker I love simple solutions and Laravel seemed to me the easiest way to build something simple, and more importantly, easily maintainable, which is the most important for me.

<comment><USER35> That's what I meant, I would contribute a dockerfile, which people may use to run the application with one command. Would standard Laravel instructions to deploy an app[1] help me here or do you need additional steps?

[1]: Maybe something like [https://medium.com/laravel-news/the-simple-guide- to-deploy-l...](https://medium.com/laravel-news/the-simple-guide-to-deploy- laravel-5-application-on-shared-hosting-1a8d0aee923e) (first thing I could find)

<comment><USER36> Just tried setting it up, pretty simple assuming you're comfortable with Linux.

You need MySQL/MariaDB, PHP >= 5.5.9 (see composer.json, require section for version requirements - worked with 7.1.x for me), node/npm, and composer (typically installed from getcomposer.org)

Otherwise, directions at [https://github.com/monicahq/monica#setup-the- project](https://github.com/monicahq/monica#setup-the-project) work with one exception: I'm not familiar with laravel in particular, but I had to do some funkyness with the the .env file:

Replace APP_KEY=SomeRandomString with a valid key, like this random one I found on the internet: APP_KEY=base64:i7QndWbN33zY1x013Yw2cju9KQsxpT/1nnf8/3ziZ+U=

Then run php artisan key:generate to get a new one.

(Set DB credentials in .env as well)

Finally, php artisan serve to fire up the dev server (uses php's builtin server)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this. I think I can probably make the instructions better so you can install it easily.

<comment><USER37> Edit: Just saw at Github that you are planning all that. [https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/30](https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/30)

so nevermind

\---

Could you include in the instruction a way to set it up on a standalone apache or nginx machine without homestead, docker and all that firlefanz. I would like to just run it on my rusty cabinet server. \---

Great work though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If you're more into the terminal, a coworker of mine made a nifty tool that does similar things but works with Markdown files and a CLI. For example:

$ friends add activity Got lunch with Grace and George.

[https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/friends](https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/friends)

</comment><comment><USER39> I would like a minimal CRM for super-connectors. People like investors, promoters, etc. who traffic in relationships, and develop social capital from making introductions.

When trying to make an introduction, it's exceedingly hard to search your extensive network under certain criteria. Particularly if you want "fuzzy" matching, i.e. not just restricted to a specific geography or tag (e.g. "entrepreneur"), but looking for nearby geographies and tags.

[edit: Facebook has recently disabled Graph search features and it is _exceedingly_ difficult even to figure out which of your friends is in a particular city.]

<comment><USER30> Good to know about Facebook.

I want what you want. I'd love to know if you ever find something!

Main question - how do you profit from being a super-connector? Or do you never directly profit from it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This (monica) is so manual that I signed up and got put off. I don't feel the tool giving me a leverage. It increases my effort. I want more value for same effort that I already put in (or better, for lesser effort).

Case in point, 1) offer to import my contacts from my phone, email, FB, linkedin, etc. I'm not typing that sh*t in.

2) Pull call logs from my phone, I'm not manually entering that either. Are you crazy?

3) Birthdays from FB

4) activities from other apps. Like movie together from bookmyshow (a popular app where I live), etc

</comment><comment><USER41> I like this idea. :) We could even collaborate if interested. For the very same purposes, plus to organize everything else I want to, I wrote and use OneModel (AGPL), creating inside it a calendar with ticklers, lists of gift ideas or other ideas for activities, etc, all sorted by when I want to see them or how I can most easily find them in a hierarchy. I have created a sort of structure for things I might to remember about each person (journal of past interactions, contact info, etc etc) that I also use for my dealings with some businesses so I can revisit who said what when, if needed. And it can auto- provide the structure in for future persons or organizations I add to my contact list, but only when wanted. Same with anything else I want to track.

And it creates a soft of personal journal for me as a side-effect, by exporting everything created (or archived) for date ranges, so my odd random notes fit in also. It lets you optionally mark things as public or private, export things as .txt outlines or an .html mini-web site, and (hopefully) soon exchange info with others if desired. Self- or my-hosted.

Unfortunately, OM also lacks a nice video and installation is still manual (some postgres config instructions then "java -jar...") until interest warrants a real installer. I use it for _everything_ (no mobile support yet) and it is _extremely_ efficient for a touch typist, and easy to learn as everything is on the screen in menus generated context-sensitively on the fly.

Many details, download, FAQs and future plans at: [http://onemodel.org](http://onemodel.org) .

<comment><USER42> onemodel looks good. I'd love it as a knowledge graph editor that focuses on information from a personal standpoint. Would be interesting to map the data model to RDF.

Java has many good RDF libraries such as Jena.

<comment><USER41> If it had RDF export would that make you a user? I need feedback (eg, users) now (along with some prettifying and installers). I invite you to join the discussion list and continue this.

<comment><USER42> If it roundtrips to RDF losslessly it certainly might. I like the konsole interface and the idea of publishing a subset to a website.

<comment><USER41> Thanks for the comments. I'd be interested in why RDF is important (ideally, on the OM discussion list :). To me, OM is better than the semantic web (on which I am not an expert), for reasons I try to explain in OM's FAQs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I would be very much interested in developing an Android app for this one having developed a couple of them myself. Are you interested in tag teaming?

<comment><AUTHOR> While I don't know what tag teaming is, I would need to develop an API first and foremost to let you actually do that. I'm planning to create an API in the coming weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks superb, thank you for building a great product with a non-hostile privacy policy.

Before trusting my data/time with something, I generally like to understand the motivations of the creators.

Do you intend to run this as a profit making business, or just as an open source project? Do you have thoughts/opinions on monetization? How do you intend to continue to develop it in the medium/long term?

<comment><AUTHOR> I intend to run this as a profit making business on the long run. How, I don't know yet. I don't like the idea of restricting the number of contacts you can have. Probably a paid plan for advanced features. I'm on this application for the long run - and this is also one of the reasons I've open sourced it: if I lose interest, the community will be in charge of developing it further. The current license permits it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Love it!

Feature requests and ideas are obviously not scarce today - I too have some ideas after playing with it for a bit:

\- It would be great if there would be a place to set up a new activity that includes multiple people. So entering a birthday party with 15 people is a bit more practical than it is now. I first thought that's what the journal is about, but it doesn't seem have this feature (yet?). Like it is now, the journal seems not very useful at all to be honest.

\- I'd love to set up relationships (SO, children, and more) between existing/full contacts, rather than the child and SO field setting up an "elaborate note".

\- Do the notifications reach me in any way? Would be awesome to check a box if I want a reminder via email or browser notification

Even without those features I can see myself using this. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for your comment!

I love all your ideas you've mentioned there. I've created an issue about it: [https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/118](https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/118) . About the notifications, they all come by email at the moment. I'd love to have a Telegram integration too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Love this idea, the things that would really make it a no-brainer for me would be ability to upload multiple photos for a contact (or in a note) and a native/hybrid app. I could probably deal with the webapp on my phone but an app with push notifications would be ideal IMHO.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why multiple photos for one contact? I get the importance of one photo, but why multiple?

Yeah, if only I knew how to create mobile apps, I'd do it in a hearbeat. One more thing I need to learn.

<comment><USER45> I can speak highly of Ionic for developing hybrid mobile apps using HTML/JS/CSS

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Tried to signup with facebook and got the error: "The redirect_uri URL must be absolute"

</comment><comment><USER47> Great idea, but I would've much preferred a mobile app for this, which could sync my contacts automatically, log my calls to each contact and let me enter notes. The desktop app seems good but seems like a lot of work for the user.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree. I'll get there :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The biggest problem I have with any productivity, life improvement tools, todo lists, etc is not the tools themselves but getting past the apathy and lethargy of not using said tools.

That is I just can't create good habits or care enough to use them even though I know I could really improve my life if I did.

I would imagine its sort of like exercising (albeit I actually do do that).

Some never do it, some do it no matter what but the mass majority get on and off the wagon. We do it for a short post New Years'-eve-like period and then just eventually stop.

I need some way to force good habits like a drug (and yes I know about James Clear who blogs about this).

</comment><comment><USER49> Why a web-app instead of a local application? Why does this need to be connected to the internet, when it doesnt interact with anything?

Is it because you want to be able to sync to other devices, such as a phone app in the future?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because I just know web stuff. I did some .net like 15 years ago, but now I just know PHP and HTML, basically. Moreover, I'd love to create an app too, which would require an API, which requires to be available online.

<comment><USER5> Well I'm glad this isn't .NET, or almost as bad, Electron. I think web is a fine choice, provided it's open source and self-hostable for those who care.

<comment><USER50> What's wrong with .NET? Even if you don't like programming with it you'd get a native application.

<comment><USER5> That I don't use Microsoft Windows.

<comment><USER51> You're behind the times. .NET Core makes true cross-platform apps (at least Windows, Macs and Linux).

Though the only way to create cross-platform desktop apps with .NET Core is Electron, so yes, not good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Thank you so much for this! It's something that's been kicking around in the back of my head for ages, but it was never a big enough priority for me to tackle. I'll definitely be checking it out!

<comment><USER53> Seconded! Today I am taking something off my software projects bucket list that has been there since '03-'04\. Thank you! Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I think this product is Fantastic. One of the main jobs I hire FB for is Birthdays, looking forward to using this:

Few tiny feature requests: \- Make the <title> of the page the person you are looking at, really helps with multiple tabs. \- Filters for Gender & more options for non-binary Gender would be great. \- Just been adding a bunch of contacts, a tiny help would be when pasting a name into first name, to split on space and put the second name in.

Hope you can find a way to add Paid features you keep this going over the long term.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot!

Excellent idea about the <title> tab. I've created an issue about it ([https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/45](https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/45)). For the other stuff, it was already on the pipeline. Thanks :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Tangent: anybody have recommendations for a "CRM" for tracking your activity when you are job hunting? What stage you are at, people you've talked to at company, what version of resume they have, etc. Typically I've just duct taped one together with folders, spreadsheet, and Evernote. Always at the back of my mind that there could be something better perhaps. Normal CRMs seem to general and complicated from my limited perusing. Someone should make this. I'd pay for it!

<comment><USER56> It's more Trello than a CRM, but there are [https://jobtrack.io/](https://jobtrack.io/) and [http://huntr.co/](http://huntr.co/)

<comment><USER55> Thanks. These are pretty close to what I had in mind!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Nice project. Keep in mind I'm just a tire-kicker on HN, but it would be neat to have dynamic periodic reminders similar to spaced repetition learning algorithms except you rate the strength of the relationship after each session. Strong ratings mean you can see them a little less frequently; weak means you should see them (a little) more frequently.

Ideally this would let you maximize the number of maintainable acquaintances. Unfortunately (for some), it would also prevent any from getting too close. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the idea. How would you rate the strength of the relationship? A star mechanism?

<comment><USER57> Yes, I'm imagining 1-5 stars with text descriptions to help ratings be consistent, similar to how software like [http://mnemosyne- proj.org/features](http://mnemosyne-proj.org/features) handles ratings.

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't it weird though to put stars on people?

<comment><USER58> You wouldn't put stars on people but on relationships... it's something you can have am effect on, so I wouldn't mind rating it !

<comment><AUTHOR> Ohhh I see the subtitly. That is an awesome idea. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Love this! Definitely gonna be using it from now on!

Adding a way to import contacts would be super cool, though I like the idea of slowly going through all my contacts and making sure data is current, etc (something I haven't done ever, since I first got my phone 10 years ago).

Only thing I just noticed is that when I try to add a gift idea, it conks out, with a: "Whoops, looks like something went wrong." message.

But I really like this and will be messing around with it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Damn. Sorry for this error. I will check the log to see why this happened.

About the contact import, yes it's high on the list :-D [https://github.com/monicahq/monica/projects/1](https://github.com/monicahq/monica/projects/1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> This looks great, and I see the utility of it. Really, honestly, well done.

May I ask what made you settle on the name "Monica" instead of something more gender-neutral?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I do appreciate the nice comment!

About the name, well, to be honest, I just didn't think about it for long. I do realize now how it might affect some people, and I do regret this choice.

<comment><USER61> Change it then, the sooner the better

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Looks really good! Am going to sign up and have a look later this evening.

Just noticed the privacy policy link on the sign up form 404s. Links to [https://app.monicahq.com/privacy](https://app.monicahq.com/privacy) instead of [https://monicahq.com/privacy](https://monicahq.com/privacy)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Indeed, that's a bug, but I don't want to fix production now because so many people are using the app right now. I'll fix it tomorrow when HN won't care anymore :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Security.

Make me feel safe when adding very personal information about people I meet.

(Btw. I've been considering building something like this myself, I meet so many people that I want to recognize and remember what they told me about themselves. Memory fails me almost every time unless I really put the effort in. Right now I just make a note after every interaction using Simplenote, better than nothing.)

<comment><AUTHOR> The security aspect is also very important to me. I'm trying to do my best to make it secure by following best practices, and this is also one of the reasons I've open sourced it actually, so the community can help make it better and check that I don't do nasty stuff with it.

<comment><USER35> Do you have any plans to integrate with contacts on any device/platform?

It may allow you to automatically save calls and manage metadata in sync with an established system.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been thinking about this. First step would be an API. Second step would be to either me learn Cocoa, ObjC or .NET to do this on the phones/desktops apps, etc..., or let the community do it.

<comment><USER64> Tools like React Native and Electron are pretty popular these days to build cross-platform apps and such. Since you know web stuff and I'm assuming JS, those might be a good option to explore so you could maintain them without having to learn the entire toolchain of building for various platforms

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I'll focus my energy on creating an API first, then I'll be able to do this. I understand how important being on mobile as a native app is. I'll do it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Looks like this is a service only for very young people? Got this wonderful error while trying to add my father.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/ijdfvwtua5nwy6p/Screenshot%202017-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/ijdfvwtua5nwy6p/Screenshot%202017-06-06%2016.53.14.png?dl=0)

<comment><USER64> US style dates, you probably want 03/18/1965

<comment><AUTHOR> Localization is important - I might need to change date format depending on the language you select. Currently Monica supports both French and English.

<comment><USER30> Just force people to use GMT and European style dates! :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> This is very cool!

My question is, is this really free? If so, how and why? It seems like it was a ton of work to build and presumably you could monetize it somehow - is that just something you're planning to do later on? If it gets a lot of users, how will you pay the (albeit small) server costs? I'm curious.

Thanks again for building it!

<comment><AUTHOR> It's free for now. I wanted first to see if there is an interest. The product is open source, so it'll be free forever anyway. I like the GitLab approach - free for everyone, but perhaps put some way to monetize this. I just have NO idea how. I honestly didn't think about it, because I wanted to have a side project that would be useful for people, and I don't know if people need this.

<comment><USER67> I think some may fear it for one of the natural monetization routes for a product like this, selling the personal info to marketers, intel-companies, credit agencies, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> @robinhood it won't let me save birthdays before 1967? Need to add people born in the 50's and 40's :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. A fix is in the pipeline, but I don't want to update the production right now, because of the traffic I get from HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Great privacy policy but it's not linked properly from your signup page:

[https://monicahq.com/privacy](https://monicahq.com/privacy)

Excited to try this, it's a Thing I've been wanting to have for quite some time now. Hope you won't mind the occasional feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Well... I WANT FEEDBACK. The more feedback, the better, so please, please, send me emails about what you want to see in the product.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> 404 comments. I'm doomed.

</comment><comment><USER70> _"You know all those birthdays you forget? And when you last called your grandmother? When you last had coffee with that ex-colleague? Who did you lend that book to again?"_

I solve all these (first-world) problems easily with Remember The Milk [ [https://www.rememberthemilk.com/](https://www.rememberthemilk.com/) ] — an underestimated tool, IMHO, to which I am loyal.

The four examples above are one-liners in RTM:

      Congratulate Alice on her birthday ^23 Nov *yearly #birthday
      Call grandma ^tom *monthly
      Coffee w/ Bob? ^1 Jul *monthly #colleague #coffee
      Get "War and Peace" back from Charlie ^in a month

Accounts are free; "pro" gives you just a few non-essential goodies (colours, Outlook sync, reminders on your phone, etc).

<comment><USER71> I have a similar comment, just using Todoist instead.. I switched from RTM Pro to Todoist Premium few months back.

</comment></comment><comment> i-machine-learn I see that you have changed the tagline to "your social memory" due to feedback from users. However, the language is really unclear and grammatically incorrect - it's a sentence fragment. Some possible solutions:

* Introduce a verb "Build your social memory"

* Introduce Monica "Your social memory, now handled by your digital assistant Monica"

* Some combo of the above "Build your social memory through your digital assistant Monica"

I'd also recommend separate each question on separate line and left align them for readability. I'd iterate on this language as it's the most important content on your page since it's the first thing user's see. You might also want to pull some of the content that is below the fold to this section.

Great idea!

</comment><comment><USER72> It was recently pointed out by a prominent member of the community that developers should stop naming personal assistants after women, because it's not a woman's job to help you out.

Does the same apply to this? Should the author change it to a more neutral name?

</comment><comment><USER73> > Dear app developers: stop naming your personal assistants after women. Stop > thinking women's jobs is to help you out. It's not.

> Stop writing copy like "Here is everything you can do with Monica" and "I've > created Monica to help these people".

From a Monica I follow on twitter.

<comment><USER74> Interesting to note that a scheduling assistant I've been testing (X.ai) offers both an Amy and an Andrew assistant. I've definitely made a conscious decision to use Andrew because of potential negative reactions to using Amy.

It does make me wonder about the choice of Apple and Amazon to use female names.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> This makes me so incredibly happy. I've wanted something like this for a long time but it was never important enough to make happen beyond some janky spreadsheets. I'll definitely keep using it and contributing. Nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for your comment :-D If you do use it, let me know what you dislike so we can improve the product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Love the idea, would like to see:

* Imports from Facebook or CardDav, one at a time is horrendous. * Relate contact to Social Facebook/LinkedIn/Meetup? * Add activity from LinkedIn/Facebook other social sites to contacts * Native App

<comment><AUTHOR> I think import seems to be the number 1 feature request. Makes a lot of sense.

Add activity from FB/Linkedin: How would you do that?

<comment><USER30> I wouldn't add activity - I would force people to not bloat their own and log it themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Here's a main feature I was looking for. I think I can solve it via "Notes" on a person but I'd love it has a main feature. I think it's similar to the SO and Children boxes.

It would be great to be able to add friends of a contact... so people that you've met once or twice (at your friend Steve's birthday party, for example), you don't know them enough to add as contact but you want to remember their name and where they work, etc. And it's essential that they are somehow connected to the person you know so you can look them up easily next time you go to Steve's party.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea Thanks! [https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/117](https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/117)

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> I find it interesting that people use the need for a CRM like this to make two opposing arguments: 1) If you need something like this to better communicate with friends/family, you must not genuinely care about them 2) If you use something like this to better communicate with friends/family, it shows that you actually do genuinely care about them

The former assumes if you care enough you should be able to do it on your own without assistance from a CRM/app, the latter does not make that assumption and gives you kudos for using the tools available to make you better at caring for others

</comment><comment><USER79> Holy dependencies, Batman. I started to try and set this up, and spent five minutes letting composer, npm, and bower install things. Gave up when it errored out because Ubuntu 16.04's nodejs was too old.

<comment><USER80> Many open source options are only commercially viable because of these types of difficulties!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It appears that facebook sign in doesn't work and gives me this error: [http://imgur.com/a/R0C9E](http://imgur.com/a/R0C9E)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for noticing, and, indeed. I broke this last week - sorry about the inconvenience. Can't fix it today anyway, way too many people trying out the site, I don't want to touch production right now :-D

<comment><USER30> Just reporting - I understand how things go when you're one person. Interesting idea, but I would benefit so much from auto import. I don't think I've missed it..

Thanks for promoting your stuff!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> I've been using Tinyblu [0] for this, which seems to be simpler/have fewer features.

0: [https://tinyblu.com/](https://tinyblu.com/)

</comment><comment><USER82> I have some org-mode files that kind of do this. I never open them or my agenda anymore, so they don't help, but they're there.

I guess I need to hook org-mode to twilio or something?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't understand what you are trying to say. What's org-mode?

<comment><USER82> [http://orgmode.org/](http://orgmode.org/) "your life in plain text" emacs stuff

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> This seems like something I may use. I have terrible memory, so I never remember birthdays, anniversaries or even my own doc appointments.

Tangentially related: I wonder what the fallout is for the average person who may get discovered using this. I could see someone catching flack for having software send them reminders of things that "should be important enough to remember". Then again, what's wrong with using technology to help me enrich my relationship with others?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's something I've struggled with while building the v1. I wondered if it was moral to use technology to help me have better relationships. I'm the kind of guy who hates Facebook and all the bad things the technology has brought into our lives. And yet, ironically, I do something like this. But the motivation behind is genuinely pure: I really want to be better at remembering things about the ones that I love.

<comment><USER84> > I really want to be better at remembering things about the ones that I love.

Marketing idea: Those with failing memory (for whatever reason) and/or their caretakers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I submitted the site to Reddit 9 months ago, and there seemed to be an interest for people with difficult social skills, actually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> Link to Privacy Policy from login page is broken [https://app.monicahq.com/privacy](https://app.monicahq.com/privacy)

<comment><USER86> Correct url: [https://monicahq.com/privacy](https://monicahq.com/privacy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Pro-tip: put your link to the newsletter, github and your twitter profile in the header of your site :).

Clearly states if it's open source, self hostable or a service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent point. Thanks, I can see how that will help. I'll update the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> An app might be asking a lot, but a responsive design to allow mobile usage would be a big help. Or at least something that could hook into IFTTT or something so I can easily add info on the go via email, twitter, or something.

For example, let's say I'm at a party and meet some people I want to log. Mobile input is really key there because I may have been drinking and won't remember that info in the next 15 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER88> You spoke about how to monetize Monica. Based on the number of comments requesting a mobile app, perhaps that's the launch point. I would use Monica's browser interface for bulk data entry, but I would use Monica on a mobile for push reminders since that's how I get my reminders/appointments now via Google Calendar. So, keep the browser interface free, but charge for the mobile app.

<comment><USER89> I would expect charging for storage. Let the user try whatever he wants for free -- both the mobile app and the website, but after some point, say one month of average usage, one faces a limited storage problem, solvable with an account upgrade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> I saw this the other day and it looks like something I need! But I have been periodically checking it since to see if a crucial (for me) feature is added. Which is: Do you have plans to add the ability to put "real" people as SOs or children? I recently found your roadmap on Github and didn't see it there. In any case this is super cool, thanks for building it and sharing it :)

</comment><comment><USER91> This is amazing! I've been looking for a CRM that is "people management without a sales focus" for a while. Mostly I want a tool to keep track of people I meet at events and the skills they have as well as problems they are facing. Then later on I can connect people who are able to solve each others problems.

Looks like this fits the bill, and being open source is great. Thanks for creating this.

<comment><AUTHOR> My pleasure. Glad you like it :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> I like it! I definitely could use something like this. I am GLAD that you mention "It's for your eyes only.". Very important feature.

</comment><comment><USER93> I'm surprised no one has mentioned friends [https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/friends](https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/friends) a command line tool that does a lot of what Monica aims to do. A Ruby gem that will be "friendly" only to laptop users, but with a wide community and continued development.

</comment><comment><USER64> Cool product. I've used calendars in the past to maintain this kind of thing but a product has many more features than a calendar so I'm into it.

A mobile app would definitely be nice for this kind of product at some point. Push notifications for reminders / an easy entry system, integration with contacts, calendar, etc.

Either way. Thanks for this cool product, and OSS-ing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Definitely. I also love the idea of OSS-ing a product. At least people will be able to contribute, or read the code and see that I have no plans in doing nasty stuff with their data at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> > _Here are everything you can do with Monica_

> _Manage significant others_

I really hope the writers of _Silicon Valley_ are taking notes right now.

</comment><comment><USER95> Great idea. Good luck. I _did_ notice a few grammatical and spelling errors on the homepage. Easily corrected. And, the content reads like a non-English speaker wrote it. Also easily remedied. The initial page needs to reflect the creativity of the idea and the professional nature of the developers. I could help, as could many others...

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed :-D Non native speaker here, hence the errors probably. Good thing: it's all open source, and all on GitHub, so... :-D [https://github.com/monicahq](https://github.com/monicahq)

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> Need to get that privacy policy link working. Love the idea of the project and it's definitely something I struggle with (especially when I get wrapped up in thinking about project problems) but when you have a "Try" link to enter a lot of personal information your Privacy Policy link needs to be explicitly clear.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand. The fix is ready, but I don't want to push it to production as I have a lot of users logged in right now thanks to HN. I'll do it as soon as the traffic drops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> This could also be named "Gary", like Gary Walsh (character) from the TV series Veep. Though it also has to carry tampons and tissues ;)

Not that Monica's not a good name, obvious throwback to a certain character on TV from the late 90's. (or maybe I'm watching too much TV and experiencing hammer-nail syndrome...)

</comment><comment><USER98> This is fantastic (and I'm not just saying that because it's based out of Montreal).

I don't realistically see myself ever using an instance of this that isn't self-hosted on a server I physically own, but there is obviously quite a bit of fair-will expressed in the no-non-sense Privacy Policy which I greatly respect.

</comment><comment><USER99> This is great! Just signed up and poked around.

FWIW, right now I just use a combination of Evernote and a Trello board to keep track of personal tasks and projects; I could see a "PRM" tool like this supplanting or complementing those other tools.

I hope you keep building. Feel free to reach out if you want some user feedback in a few weeks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will definitely keep building, especially since I see how much interest there is for a tool like this. Feel free to signup to the newsletter (that I actually never sent), I'll post updates on it regularly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> Isnt this what facebook does? Except facebook is actually way more fun to use. Sure - they take all my information and sell it to the highest bidder. But I get cool "personalized videos" in return, for example. And all my friends are already on there - so they can do most of the CRM data input for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is exactly what I don't want this product to become: Facebook. Facebook is social. Monica is NOT social. It's only for you. It's like your personal diary, except online. It's made to store things that shouldn't be seen by anyone. It's to manage YOUR personal relationships. It has nothing to do with a social community.

<comment><USER101> For me, that distinction was clearly expressed in the link and product info

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> At first glance this looks awesome. I'll set it up tomorrow on my personal server.

I saw in the github repo you've asked people not to try and make money using the code. If you really intend to build a sustainable business off this, I suggest you change the license to something stricter than MIT.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, good point, somebody pointed out this on the github repository. Do you have any idea of which license I could use instead?

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> I like the idea, it's supped buggy tho. I've been trying this for less then 30 minutes and I already landed to different error page. Right in this moment I'm stuck into the "Whoops, looks like something went wrong." page while trying to access /dashboard

</comment><comment><USER104> Yet another cloud based system for insecurely storing very personal data that I won't ever be using.

<comment><USER105> It says open-source in the first half of the title.

<comment><USER104> Open source won't keep your data confidential by itself. Are they going to port it to run offline, or exclusively sync via encrypted blobs?

It's not the technology, it's the philosophy.

<comment><USER105> My point was that you have the code so you can host it yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> Great work! I had a similar idea and built [https://socialite.ooo](https://socialite.ooo). It's been a bit neglected as I was finishing up grad school. It has a heavy focus on events and locations to tie everything together.

</comment><comment><USER107> Really great idea. So, the first thing I did was add my wife, because that just seemed like the right place to start. But then I got into this situation where I was adding myself as the significant other. Is this intended? Is there any concept of "me"?

<comment><USER5> I half-assume, without looking at the application beyond the front page (I'm still going to), that you're kind of expected to know what your wife has been up to. It might not be a common use-case to select "Me" in the significant other field.

<comment><USER107> If this thing assumes that I don't need help remembering that stuff, then it has severely overestimated me!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> Just signed up to take a look. If you're gonna have gifts as a category, maybe hook up to [https://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/search](https://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/search) ??

</comment><comment><USER109> > Just hanged out.

Just FYI, this isn't typical usage. People say hung instead of hanged in this instance.

<comment><USER110> Typically the word "hanged" is used in the context of an execution ie "she was hanged from the gallows for her crimes"

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> Looks great and useful! One small UX issue I've just hit - I missed the "edit" button in the "Personal Information" box when viewing a contact for a few moments. Kept trying to click the "Birthdate is not set" etc text.

<comment><USER111> Oh also, there are >16000 countries in the select box on the edit person page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> Looks so much like JIRA that I had to check it wasn't an Atlassian side project.

Who did the visual design?

</comment><comment><USER113> I really like this and we actually thinking about trying a CRM earlier today. Hopefully, I can find sometime to contribute. The ability to import contacts would be super useful. I might be able to get to it this weekend who knows...

</comment><comment><USER114> The privacy policy page is a 404: [https://app.monicahq.com/privacy](https://app.monicahq.com/privacy)

Is this a thing you pay for as a user or is this a thing like fb where user data is sold?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I'll fix the link as soon as I can push to prod without interrupting the traffic thanks to being 2nd on HN today.

None of this. You don't pay for a user, and I don't sell data to anyone. I'll introduce paying features later this year, but I have no idea which ones, and it WONT be about limiting the number of contacts.

Also, I'm like all people on HN, I hate the notion of selling data WITH A PASSION.

</comment></comment><comment><USER115> Love it. This seems to be the answer to a question that Facebook forgot completely. To help you improve your social life with the people you really care about. Not just distract you with irrelevant information. Keep it up!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the kind words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> "Signing up signifies you've read and agree to our Privacy Policy." [https://app.monicahq.com/privacy](https://app.monicahq.com/privacy) is 404 :)

</comment><comment><USER117> Looks interesting. Definitely something that could be useful. Issue I have is getting my data in to the system. Would be good to be able to pull contacts from a CSV / Google account / Facebook account.

</comment><comment><USER118> "You know good and well that's not what they're saying." [http://imgur.com/ffRSyJ0](http://imgur.com/ffRSyJ0)

Couldn't help myself. I'm sorry.

</comment><comment><USER119> Bug report: [https://app.monicahq.com/register](https://app.monicahq.com/register) links to /privacy which is a 404 because of the subdomain.

</comment><comment><USER120> It would be great if you could add city as a form field and allow searching by city. I'd love to pay for this/contribute as well. I was just about to build something similar (but less pretty)

</comment><comment><USER121> Is there a way to mark someone as being related to me (e.g. Significant Other == me)? Also, related, could Significant Others be set as "People" as well?

Thanks for this, I see myself using it quite a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh! Well... good point. There is no such things at the moment. What you want seems to be relationships between you and the contact, or between contacts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER122> It would be nice to have an option to set relationship (wife, son, daughter, friends etc) so in the future maybe I can even watch my genealogical tree or just select to see my family or friends

<comment><AUTHOR> I will do it :-D [https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/19](https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/19)

</comment></comment><comment><USER123> This looks very polished. If only every MVP had such a good UX/design.

Personally my calendar with contact notes work pretty well so I won't be using Monica but it was a pleasure trying it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment. Yeah a calendar with notes work also perfectly. We should use tools that we love. Not everything should be a webapp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER124> Interesting. Would it make sense to integrate this to various social media, so that you could see your contacts profiles or recent activity, or maybe even integrate messaging?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, one of my idea would be to have a Chrome extension where you would see the private notes about the contact you are currently seeing on Facebook, for instance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER125> It looks like you're using monotonically increasing numbers for people, I couldn't exploit it straight away, looks like users have added around 900 people so far.

<comment><AUTHOR> What's wrong with that? It's just a counter :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER126> I am in the process (Slowly) of making something similar

[https://simplerm.co](https://simplerm.co)

Monica looks way more feature complete though! Nice work.

</comment><comment><USER127> Why would I want trust even more personal data to a web service?

Why couldn't this be an app on my phone that synced securely with other instances of the app on my other devices?

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't need to trust me. You can host it yourself locally if you want, it's open source. [https://github.com/monicahq](https://github.com/monicahq)

</comment></comment><comment><USER128> Thank you for building this. I have been wanting to build something like this for myself for some time. I'll check it out and see what I like for sure!

</comment><comment><USER129> I have been looking for this / thinking about building this for YEARS. I tried to sign up but got some kind of FB "redirect uri" error.

<comment><USER130> Me too.

        The redirect_uri URL must be absolute

</comment></comment><comment><USER131> Great work yo! One thing: the privacy link on your sign up page is broken. You probably want to fix this as soon as possible.

Isn't it odd nobody mentioned that?

</comment><comment><USER132> I find this utopian. Another strange thing: "Manage significant others". Maybe it's just me, but I have exactly 1 significant other.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not your significant other per se - the significant others of all your contacts, combined

</comment></comment><comment><USER133> Hope you don't have any friends or family older than 50! Entering birthdates prior to 01/01/1967 is not allowed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. So sorry about that, but a fix is ready to be shipped for that, but I don't want to interrupt the prod right now, way too much traffic from HN :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER134> "Here are everything you can do with Monica" -> "Here is everything you can do with Monica"

</comment><comment><USER77> I look forward to trying this out. This idea has been on my mind for a few years now. Never built it of course :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Me too, until now :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER135> Really lovely. I signed up and will use this as soon as there is an ability to import Google/email contacts.

</comment><comment><USER136> How about an option to organize family as a family tree? That's something I'm looking for currently.

</comment><comment><USER137> Maybe you should call it "PRO" \- Personal Relationship Organizer :) Or "Monica PRO".

</comment><comment><USER138> Am I the only one who thinks Ja Rule's line in The Fast and the Furious: "Monicaaaaaaa!"

</comment><comment><USER139> Thanks for saving my time. I planned to write one for my self this year. Is it open source?

<comment><USER140> Yes, link [1] is in the footer of the homepage.

[1] [https://github.com/monicahq/monica](https://github.com/monicahq/monica)

</comment></comment><comment><USER141> Do you have any plans on making a mobile app? Reminders are most useful on mobile only.

</comment><comment><USER142> Looks neat. As an aside, why is it named after a woman? I'm genuinely curious.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Well, I built this website because I didn't have a spouse at that time, and I suffered socially from this, not being able to remember important things about my friends (call it selective memory or what not). My partner used to be the one who always reminded me these kind of things. It's an hommage to her.

<comment><USER143> Huh. I was sure it was a, uh, racially-tinged joke from knowyourmeme.

<comment><USER143> (incidentally, NOT a joke)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER144> Hey robinhood - Are you considering packaging this up as a standalone iphone app?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! This is a second step though - the first one is to create the APIs first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER145> I don't see how this is anything more than a wiki with a really nice skin.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wiki = most web apps = interface to a database. So in a sense, it's all the same, just another way to look at it. So,no, it's not really different. Except perhaps that a wiki doesn't send you emails for reminders?

</comment></comment><comment><USER146> I love this. I want to stick it on an RPi and keep it on at all times.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you do find yourself in a position where you do need to do specific things related to Rpi in order to make this work, feel free to submit a pull request with instructions, so others can also install it as well. [https://github.com/monicahq/monica](https://github.com/monicahq/monica)

</comment></comment><comment><USER147> Can I specify myself as a SO for other person in my list? :)

</comment><comment><USER148> I've looking for something like this for years! Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> You are welcome. Feel free to tell me how we can improve the product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER149> Nice idea. Any chance you could fix the privacy policy link?

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course. In order to open source the product, I had to separate the marketing app from the code of the main app, and I forgot to update the link. Doh. Thanks for noticing, here is the link: [https://monicahq.com/privacy.html](https://monicahq.com/privacy.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER150> I've been looking for this for a long while!

</comment><comment><USER151> BTW I use BusyContacts for this on my Mac.

</comment><comment><USER152> Oh man, I really need this hahahah :)

</comment><comment><USER153> This seems useful for Tinder (ha ha)

</comment><comment><USER154> Privacy page returns 400 :(

</comment><comment><USER155> Seriously...

</comment><comment><USER156> Yes but can I easily redirect my inlaws?

<comment><AUTHOR> Redirect to... what? Unless it's a joke I don't understand :-/

<comment><USER157> Its a joke. Based on the trope of people having a poor relationship with their in-laws.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER158> Sorry to be that guy, but isn't there a huge legal issue? In France, the CNIL requires a declaration of any file, especially if you keep information about people in it, whether it's a spreadsheet or in good old punch cards. Such files can only be maintained for specific purpose; notably keeping tabs on what people want or their secrets can be used for bribes and leverage. An Excel file on your computer won't get you arrested because of leniency, but if we start issuing such software, the defense is less solid than for Torrent software.

i.e. What happens if a database is leaked?

</comment><comment><USER159> edit: was wrong, see replies.

<comment><USER75> From the github[0]

> If you prefer to, you can simply clone the repository and set it up yourself > on any hosting provider, for free. I'm just asking that you don't try to > make money out of it yourself.

[0] [https://github.com/monicahq/monica](https://github.com/monicahq/monica)

<comment><USER159> Thanks for bringing that to my attention! That's fantastic and I think they should put more focus on this option on the homepage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER160> Opal Skyview so huu vi tri chien luoc, ngay mat tien Dai lo Pham Van Dong|de an cu hay dau tu thi Opal Skyview that su la lua chon ly tuong. Can ho Opal Skyview len cao, tam nhin huong ra view song Sai Gon xanh mat va dong gio ngap tran|Opal Skyview con co san pham can ho Duplex, Officetel de khach hang mua dau tu hoac cho thue [http://duandatxanh.biz/](http://duandatxanh.biz/)

</comment><comment><USER161> I use Lewinsky to manage my favorites on www. p o r n h u b .com</comment>


How to become a famous Rails Developer, Ruby Rockstar or Code Ninja - <AUTHOR> http://ontwik.com/ruby/how-to-become-a-famous-rails-developer-ruby-rockstar-or-code-ninja/

<comment><USER2> Rockstars, ninjas, gurus. It's all insecurity if you ask me.

<comment><USER3> Let me sing you a song about how my sword brings inner enlightenment.

<comment><USER2> Now songsmith-ing, there's a skill!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The speaker put the transcript for his talk on Github: <https://gist.github.com/0a2655aed6a26fa15a02>.

<comment><USER5> The speaker is also one of Github's founder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In other news: How to become just a developer

<comment><USER7> How to work in team, how to understand a vision, how to compromise, how to lead, how to educate, how to accept others' education, how to accept to be wrong, how to justify when you're right, ...

Ninjas, gurus, rockstars, ... isn't that just 2006 buzz words for biz pple recruiting tech pple ?

<comment><USER8> What else is left? Pirate? Astronaut? Clown? Zombie?

(also, it is spelled "people")

<comment><USER9> There's always Terrorist, Vagrant, or Dilettante. In my view the latter is usually the most accurate for the self-claimed "Ninjas" out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> it improves around minute 10, that's where he stops the humorous intro & starts talking about being a developer.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've begun to dislike Youtube because of the fact that it doesn't offer downloads.

I dug up the video on blip.tv. If you are interested <http://railsconf.blip.tv/file/2086330> (yes it allows download).

<comment><USER12> If you're using Firefox or IE, Flashget or Ant solve that problem nicely:

<http://www.flashget.com/>

<http://www.ant.com/video-downloader>

<comment><USER11> I use a nice Awk script <https://github.com/pkrumins/gnu-awk-youtube- downloader> to download youtube videos (a dozen thanks to the creator) when i don't find a downloadable version elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If its going to sound like he's reading, I'd rather just read the it.

Delivering a fully written out speech word for word in a compelling manner is really hard, so I don't mean that as a criticism, but it was a little hard to listen to.

</comment><comment><USER14> Stop talking, start doing. After a while you'll become a ninja/guru/rockstar/superstar/ubber nerd/super geek/jesus/zombie/whatever you wanna call yourself.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm voting that the original poster should have removed the word 'rockstar' and 'ninja' from the title, specific for HN. Just sayin.

</comment><comment><USER16> I can't tell if this guy is just nervous, or a terrible presenter. A little of both, I'd guess.

<comment><USER17> Possibly just nervous

<comment><USER18> I think he looks more nervous because he's looking down to read off the paper. Maybe extemporaneous speech would have looked smoother?</comment></comment></comment>


Delta and American Airlines say they won't make their coach seats tighter - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/24/17608948/delta-american-airlines-coach-seats-tighter-legroom <comment><USER2> This is something people like to complain about, but are unwilling to pay more for. It's very easy to not sit in a cramped economy seat, you can pay for a roomy first class seat. If it's too expensive, then you don't really value the extra space after all.

You can also switch airlines to a carrier that has a roomier seat.

<comment><USER3> > _If it's too expensive, then you don't really value the extra space after > all._

This does not follow at all. You can value the extra space to a high degree, yet still be unable to afford or unwilling to pay the premium for first class. It doesn't mean you do not value it—especially in the case that you cannot afford a very expensive first-class ticket. Now, I'm somewhat with you where paying an extra two-digit charge for an economy+ seat is concerned, but first class is often several multiples of an economy ticket.</comment></comment>


Netflix: How we got a grip on AWS's cloud - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/cloud/2012/03/18/netflix-how-we-got-a-grip-on-awss-cloud-40095277/

<comment><USER2> Good read even if you're not an AWS shop. The interview has insights that go beyond AWS specifics such as dependency management in large-scale systems and relationships and roles of dev and ops teams.

</comment><comment><USER3> for a sec, i thought the line said "How we got ripped on AWS' cloud" , +1 me if any one else thought the same.</comment>


Nokia's last stand - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/06/features/nokias-last-stand?page=all

<comment><USER2> The article makes a good case for Nokia and Elop.

The company states that customers do not care what operating system is in the phone. The argument is that distinctive and efficient design will lead to enough sales to reverse the current rapid drain on Nokia cash.

Do you buy this argument? And how much cash will Nokia have left in 12 months?</comment>


Adam Silver Reveals the Chinese Government Asked Him to Fire Daryl Morey - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191018/08572043215/adam-silver-reveals-chinese-government-asked-him-to-fire-daryl-morey.shtml <comment><USER2> If companies take too much of China's money, they can and will use it as leverage to stifle free speech.</comment>


Report: 39% of Game Developers Working on AR/VR Headsets – Road to VR - <AUTHOR> http://www.roadtovr.com/report-39-game-developers-working-arvr-headsets/ <comment><USER2> Are those games being optimised for VR, designed for VR controllers, and are getting VR-specific gameplay elements? Or are they simply written to include a VR headset as a display option? The first would indicate game developers are betting on VR being a big deal. The second would simply be developers hedging against their games being labelled as incompatible.</comment>


WhatsApp Security Advisories - <AUTHOR> https://www.whatsapp.com/security/advisories <comment><USER2> Why was this submitted? The newest WhatsApp CVE is more than 6 months old.

<comment><USER3> [https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2020-1894](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2020-1894) This was yesterday I think? With code-exec through a stack over flow in push to talk. Unless the date-format is out of whack. and 09/03 is 9 march not 3 september

<comment><USER4> depends if it's the American date format or the rest-of-the-wold date format

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > If you lose access to your WhatsApp account, the messages you previously > received will remain on your phone and will not be available elsewhere.

As I understand it, if you give in to the android app's repeated prompts to enable backing up to your google account then your messages _are_ stored elsewhere, and without encryption.

Could someone confirm if this is still the case?

<comment><USER6> That is correct. Same for iCloud backup on iPhones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What surprises me about the list of CVEs is how many of them affect both Android and iOS. One would assume they are two completely independent codebases.

<comment><USER8> Many mobile apps rely on shared components/libs/frameworks that are either developed by the company or are FOSS (libpl_droidsonroids_gif for example). In either case...they are platform agnostic and usually written in C. And as we all know C is full of memory handling problems like overflows.

Hopefully in 2020 and beyond people will be developing these shared components in Rust instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This thread thus far has a ton of comments from people who haven't bothered to actually read anything about how WhatsApp works, or how the Signal protocol works.

It would make for a better comment thread if everyone did that prior to expressing an opinion.

<comment><USER10> This kind of snide comment gets upvoted because everyone sees it as a way of looking down on the 'other comments'.

If you have something specific to say to each of the people who "didn't read the spec" then please respond to those people with that, instead of making passive aggressive commentary and making us assume the worst in everyone else in the comments.

<comment><USER11> It's completely appropriate to ask the HN community to do more work before posting, instead of posting opinions that haven't been checked against reality. The mods use this same approach when advising us to act better: a single top-level comment, discussing a common misbehavior and asking for it to stop. We should aspire to be a better community, but individually chastising tens of comments for posting unfounded and repetitive comments would pollute the discussion with needless repetition of the same core point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "We do not store private messages on our servers"

Are all messages "private" messages? Or is this intended to distinguish group chats from one-to-one chats?

<comment><USER13> It's fully documented: [https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and- privacy/end-to...](https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and-privacy/end- to-end-encryption/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Due to the policies and practices of app stores, we cannot always list > security advisories within app release notes.

Yeah, right. Here's your three latest release notes for the iOS app:

      2.20.92 Aug 25, 2020
      Bug fixes.

      2.20.91 Aug 24, 2020
      Bug fixes.

      2.20.90 Aug 19, 2020
      Bug fixes.

Surely you can do better than that?

<comment><USER15> IMO these walled-garden app stores that are supposed to be "so good for the users" should require quality release notes that describe the exact "performance improvements and bug fixes" that the respective apps apparently receive.

<comment><USER16> _IMO these walled-garden app stores that are supposed to be "so good for the users" should require quality release notes that describe the exact "performance improvements and bug fixes" that the respective apps apparently receive._

What is it that makes you think this is caused by "walled gardens?" Do you have a link to a policy that requires this, or is it your own biases showing through?

<comment><USER15> I think you may have misunderstood my comment... I'm saying that if the walled garden app stores are supposed to be good for users (especially if this is one of their marketing bullet points), one might reasonably expect that "high- detail release notes" ought to be one of the requirements for app developers, imposed by the owner of the app store (Apple, Google, etc.) .. This way users get a good understanding of what changes will happen when they download an update of a given app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > We do not store private messages on our servers _once we deliver them_

Doesn't this mean that messages exist in plaintext on Facebook's servers for at least the time it takes to deliver them? To me this is equal to saying that everything is clear text anyway, since there is no way to ensure someone lawfully or unintentionally taps the text stream and diverts it somewhere.

Am I misunderstanding?

<comment><USER18> Probably just means the encrypted messages are in holding on the server until delivered. There's not much alternative to that unless peers are enabled to talk directly to each other, which would likely be a poor experience due to reliability and connectivity issues.

<comment><USER19> It would probably be much more ideal to have peers send messages to each other directly & only use the server for store + forward if the send fails.

<comment><USER6> True P2P isn't really possible today in the vast majority of ISP networks (especially mobile ones), so at most traffic will be relayed by a TURN server which is also centralized.

<comment><USER19> Are you sure that mobile networks really go out of their way to block STUN, not to mention that they're predominantly IPV6 so the reasons for NAT would be weird at the carrier level (haven't investigated this too thoroughly so not sure).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


FFmpeg 3.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://ffmpeg.org/download.html <comment><USER2> At Jumpshare, we use FFmpeg for screen recording. We noticed that the previous version of FFmpeg was not DPI aware. So we went ahead and fixed it. Now FFmpeg will show correct mouse location in hdpi screens. Unfortunately, it seems FFmpeg 3.0 does not ship with this fix. Nevertheless, we're happy to contribute to this open source project.

Here's the fix if anyone is interested: [https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/commit/00c73c475e3d2d7049ee...](https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/commit/00c73c475e3d2d7049eed73ea956f6798365b36a)

<comment><USER3> First time that I hear about your service and it seems like a copy of Dropbox but with way more features. (the interface)

Just a suggestion: Jumpshare Plus link should either be at the top or renamed "Pricing" because you don't see it directly and the usual ctrl+f of pricing gives nothing. Plus your pricing is nothing to be ashamed of :)

<comment><USER2> Hi, thank you for the feedback and suggestions. We will make sure to include the pricing in the new homepage we're working on. :)

By the way, we're more about quick sharing than syncing. We will be overhauling our homepage to make that clearer. Here's the app if you're using a Mac (Windows app is coming soon): [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jumpshare/id889922906](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jumpshare/id889922906)

<comment><USER4> Syncing (and its related attributes of backup and redundancy) are more useful, and Dropbox facilitates both that and sharing. So what's your angle? :)

<comment><USER2> At it's core, Dropbox is about "syncing". But at Jumpshare, the core is "quick sharing". This makes all the difference. We're able to build our product around the quick sharing aspect, for example, our sharing happens in real-time so you don't have to wait for uploads to finish first. And we offer a slew of built-in tools (capturing screenshots, annotations, recording screencasts, etc) and features to supercharge your sharing.

You can learn more from the discussion here: [https://www.producthunt.com/tech/jumpshare-for- mac](https://www.producthunt.com/tech/jumpshare-for-mac)

<comment><USER4> Okay, but what happens when Dropbox makes a minor upgrade to their sharing, making it also "quick" or real-time sharing? Already, when uploading a file to Dropbox, it can be shared and partially downloaded before it's finished uploading. Do that with an image or video that was just recorded, or that is being recorded, and that seems like real-time sharing to me.

And doing that with Dropbox means that, after it's been shared, it's also synced, mirrored, and backed up for you.

Where does that leave Jumpshare?

<comment><USER5> > Where does that leave Jumpshare?

Promoting six-line pull requests on a fringe news website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This screams for proper release notes. The official ones are pretty light ([http://git.videolan.org/gitweb.cgi/ffmpeg.git/?p=ffmpeg.git;...](http://git.videolan.org/gitweb.cgi/ffmpeg.git/?p=ffmpeg.git;a=blob;f=RELEASE_NOTES;h=861dc04a1316c8333cc49e9231fd4a6ffabe8282;hb=c40983a6f631d22fede713d535bb9c31d5c9740c) ), and refer to the Changelog ([http://git.videolan.org/gitweb.cgi/ffmpeg.git/?p=ffmpeg.git;...](http://git.videolan.org/gitweb.cgi/ffmpeg.git/?p=ffmpeg.git;a=blob;f=Changelog;h=2e1cd36f5fe9cce3880697ddfe3079c0b1654473;hb=c40983a6f631d22fede713d535bb9c31d5c9740c) ) which is quite terse. Phoronix did some reformatting of the changelog, it's a bit easier to read:

[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FFmpeg-3....](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FFmpeg-3.0-Released)

But honestly this type of stuff should be done by the project before any release.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, sorry about that. It was indeed done in a hurry.

I think the main highlights are:

\- The API/ABI break (implied by the major bump)

\- The many improvements in the native AAC encoder making it the recommended one (libaacplus and libvo-aacenc are removed)

\- A ton of filters were added

\- Many ASM optimizations that weren't mentioned in the Changelog (it will take a while to make highlights on those, I don't remember them)

Hopefully a proper news will be posted soon. Sorry again.

<comment><USER8> @imaginenore's comment below ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11103063](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11103063)) has a detailed list of the 29! new filters.

<comment><USER9> Wait, are you @majorsheep ? If yes your illustrations are really good :) [http://www.king-sheep.com/star-wars-the-force-awakens-fan- ar...](http://www.king-sheep.com/star-wars-the-force-awakens-fan-art-part-2/)

<comment><USER8> Nope. I can't take credit for the illustrations, but I might have to get in touch with Nathan since there is some nattaylor out there who likes to put my gmail address for all of their online services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thanks to all the FFmpeg contributors! Fantastic piece of software.

On a project I was recently on recently we started hitting the per-region concurrent transcode limits on Amazon's Elastic Transcoder. [1]

Instead of sharding over pipelines or accounts we set up a pipeline with FFMPEG + Lambda functions and it performed fantastically (within the free tier even).

It was incredibly simple to write the functions and has given that project a lot more freedom; with the caveat that the any single task you undertake should occur within the timeout window (currently 5 minutes). Having said that, it's also straight forward to split the process into steps and have multiple lambda jobs to make the flow more of a pipeline.

[1] [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/latest/develope...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/latest/developerguide/limits.html)

<comment><USER11> Did you try simply asking AWS to raise the limit? It even suggests so on your linked page.

In my experience, every limit is immediately relaxed when requested; number of VPCs (I see people do horrible things to work around this all the time! Just ask!), EC2s / region, SES limits (need to send 10 million emails / day? No problem!), API Gateways / account, total ASGs... I believe all of these are there to keep you from shooting yourself in the foot through automation gone wrong or inexperience.

I've seen some crazy complicated architectures, where just sending an email or lifting up the phone solves the thing within an hour.

<comment><USER12> There are some limits they can't/don't want to increase.

<comment><USER13> I'm yet to find a limit that they won't adjust - what ones are you referring to?

<comment><USER14> S3 buckets are one I've seen. But there's not really a reason to have 100 s3 buckets, much less more than that.

<comment><USER13> Yes, that's one that you may not be able to change. From memory, they put that one in place to prevent the equivalent of bucket name squatting (since every bucket has a corresponding public domain name).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I know this has been a constant question (in the lines of "Should I go Python 2.x or 3.x?")...but I feel the need to ask it again on the event of a major point release for ffmpeg...but how are things, pragmatically-speaking, in terms of libav vs ffmpeg? I had thought that libav was the new way a few years ago and have more or less been using it on OS X...but now I see that Debian recently switched back to ffmpeg [1]...What are the use-cases for sticking with libav these days? I'm almost sure I started using libav because it was promoted as a concerted effort to create a better API. But by some accounts, ffmpeg has been incorporating libav's changes...and I honestly don't use libav or ffmpeg enough, directly, to really benefit from a better API. And installing both, I believe, has led to a few subtle errors when using libraries that wrap around either.

So, any reason for the casual graphics developer to install libav?

[1] [https://lwn.net/Articles/650816/](https://lwn.net/Articles/650816/)

edit: Oh I see that VLC at some point switched to libav. That was likely a deciding factor when I last did my nominal research into ffmpeg vs libav:

[http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=blob;f=contrib/src/ffmp...](http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=blob;f=contrib/src/ffmpeg/rules.mak;h=85fea9c43e5b7e46ab9a2902e7279b9e0674acc0;hb=HEAD)

<comment><USER16> > libav [...] promoted as a concerted effort to create a better API

True, but that was biased and unfair. Some developers leveraged their Debian influence to get Debian to switch from ffmpeg to libav, but the technical merits were debatable. In the end, they came back to ffmpeg.

This is mostly a political issue. Software-wise AFAIK ffmpeg has been integrating many changes from libav but the opposite is not true, making IMHO ffmpeg the right choice.

Good article (2012) with in-depth history: [http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the- ffmpeg-libav-situation.html](http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav- situation.html)

More recent (2015) short take on the matter, seems pretty biased though: [https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FFmpeg-versus- Libav](https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FFmpeg-versus-Libav)

Wikipedia entry: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libav#Fork_from_FFmpeg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libav#Fork_from_FFmpeg)

The github link is on mpv wiki. mpv is a descendant of mplayer and mplayer2 (the latter being mostly dead). IMHO mpv is the best media player for any OS (lightweight, snappy, reads everything, better options and CLI than mplayer*, etc.).

<comment><USER17> Software-wise, ffmpeg is the more feature complete solution, obviously. But if you want a morally and ethically okay solution, with a cleaner codebase (but also NIH syndrome), libav might be the better solution.

The same people who use free software for moral and ethical reasons would also choose libav.

<comment><USER15> Sorry, what's wrong with using free software for moral and ethical reasons? I often do so because I don't feel like paying nor stealing commercial software. However, being so dependent on OSS has made me appreciate it and want to support it in what ways I can -- call it a moral imperative. Besides contributing bug reports and patches, I sometimes like using new libraries (or edge versions of existing software) if the creator, working freely, is trying to move the ball forward...having users who can provide feedback is a sort of moral support.

In the case of libav...as an admitted casual, I'm thankful that ffmpeg exists, even if its API confuses me...I'm grateful enough to think that the status quo is just fine, whether I can rationalize it or not. However, I do find it admirable that some people (ostensibly) wanted to make what they think were forward-thinking changes, including doing the kind of cleanup that is generally under-appreciated and under-prioritized in all software.

So if they're promising a transparent, interoperable interface...sure, I'll give it a try, and it will be for "moral" reasons in the sense of moral support. I've done the same with MariaDB (over MySQL) and haven't regretted it.

<comment><USER18> What's wrong with it is that FFmpeg and Libav are on equal footing in that regard; so using that argument in favor of one over the other is... nonsensical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Among new things:

\- Common Encryption (CENC) MP4 encoding and decoding support.

\- New filters: extrastereo, OCR, alimiter, stereowiden, stereotools, rubberband, tremolo, agate, chromakey, maskedmerge, displace, selectivecolor, zscale, shuffleframes, vibrato, realtime, compensationdelay, acompressor, apulsator, sidechaingate, aemphasis, virtual binaural acoustics, showspectrumpic, afftfilt, convolution, swaprect, and others.

\- New decoding: DXV, Screenpresso SPV1, ADPCM PSX, SDX2 DPCM, innoHeim/Rsupport Screen Capture Codec, ADPCM AICA, XMA1 & XMA2, and Cineform HD.

\- New muxing: Chromaprint fingerprinting, WVE demuxer, Interplay ACM, and IVR demuxer.

\- Dynamic volume control for ffplay.

\- Native AAC encoder improvements.

\- Zero-copy Intel QSV transcoding.

\- Microsoft DXVA2-accelerated VP9 decoding on Windows.

\- VA-API VP9 hardware acceleration.

\- Automatic bitstream filtering.

<comment><USER20> Is Intel QSV available on Mac/Linux yet by any chance?

<comment><USER21> There's a patchset for this feature being discussed on the mailing list:

[http://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg- devel/2016-February/18953...](http://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg- devel/2016-February/189533.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I use ffmpeg for housekeeping stuff like converting videos from one format to the other, and cutting clips - mostly from the command line. Can some advanced users share if there is anything to look forward to with this release? Better performance? Some convenience features? Thank you in advance

<comment><USER23> From the list given by @imaginenore the major one for me is CineformHD support. We work on a lot of VR stuff and there are quite some GoPro users out there that generate material in this codec. Not having to transcode to an intermediate is nice. Also hardware acceleration is always good to have.

<comment><USER24> FYI, the phrase "quite some users" is not uncommon among (continental european?) non-native speakers of English, but it's not correct.

"In the British National Corpus, for example, most examples of quite some are "quite some time", others are "quite some distance". If you replace "quite some" with "a considerable", the meaning should be clear. If the sentence does not make sense when you do that, it's likely that "quite some" is not being used properly."

From [http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/quite- some.1011589/](http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/quite-some.1011589/)

<comment><USER23> Thanks theoh. Dutchie here. Always nice to learn something new about a foreign language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I love FFmpeg. I first used it to help with uploading 700 audio files to youtube years ago. Of course youtube is video only, so I used ffmpeg to reencode the audio with an image slideshow as video and then uploaded the "videos" using some web scrapping with perl.

More recently I have been downloading programming framework tutorials (android development, django, angular,ect) from youtube to my plex media server. I then go back with ffmpeg to reencode the vids to playback 50% faster. So now I can blast through tutorials on my TV while I eat lunch (I work from home mostly)

Edit: The release mentioned hardware acceleration improvements. I never knew ffmpeg even supported any HW accel: [https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro](https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro)

<comment><USER26> mplayer and mpv and vlc and most native players can speed videos up on the fly, tempo-shifting or pitch shifting the audio based on preferences.

Usually the [ and ] keys.

<comment><USER25> Yes, those are players. But I don't want to sit in front of my computer or cell phone while on lunch break, I want to sit on the couch in front of a TV.

Natively, neither plex or roku allows videos to be speed up, so they have to be reencoded at a different speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If _ffplay_ supported hardware decoding, it'd be the perfect player. You could not make a more minimal player. It does not, and it doesn't seem to be high on the priority list, rather in last position perhaps.

[https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/3359](https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/3359)

<comment><USER28> Have you tried mpv?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Awesome! Hoping for quick updates to the OpenBSD and FreeBSD ports.

</comment><comment><USER30> Thanks for all the work on FFmpeg!

</comment><comment><USER28> Is the built-in aac encoder better or as good as fdk-aac? I've been using fdk- aac because it gives lower bitrates and better/same sound.

<comment><USER31> libfdk historically always was a bit better and supports VBR properly.

See also: [https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC](https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC)

<comment><USER28> That's why I've been using it. Is the improved built-in encoder on par now?

<comment><USER31> I haven't done or seen any tests, but I suppose if you require VBR and/or HE- AAC support, go for libfdk, otherwise for bitrates ~128k or higher, use the internal AAC encoder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Last version was named Feynman. This 3.0 is released on 15th feb - Death of Feynman.

Coincidence?

</comment><comment><USER33> Why the heck do they make it so hard to figure out what's in the release?

<comment><USER31> There will be a proper news release on the homepage soon, I suppose.</comment></comment>


Physical fighting in high school has dropped ~50% since 1991 - <AUTHOR> https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/physical-fighting-by-youth <comment><USER2> All of this data is _self-reported_.

As punitive measures for fighting increase, it seems natural that more fighting would go unreported over time.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Article doesn't give any clear reasons why. Anyone have more info as to the drivers?</comment>


Animating OpenStreetMap as you move - <AUTHOR> http://sketchcart.herokuapp.com/

<comment><USER2> cool! but it get hung when zooming out several times</comment>